Artnet News is on the hunt for the next journalist who will helm Wet Paint, its long-running weekly gossip column. For now, guests are writing it, and today Jeppe Ugelvig files from Hong Kong.
One
Hong Kong loves luxury, and luxury loves art.
Since the founding of the Art HK fair in 2007—later acquired and renamed by the Swiss mothership, Art Basel—this law of consumerist thermodynamics has been proven year after year, defying many a typhoon, pandemic, and national security law. Nowhere do capital, culture, and commerce blend more seamlessly than in the Fragrant Harbor. Hong Kong’s particular and seductive Metabolist city planning is an ode to consumption as a great totalizer of culture, and to contemporary art as merely a niche commodity form among many others.
The fair, which closed on Sunday, is best accessed via a complex web of interlocking vertical and horizontal retail systems—essentially, it’s a mall within a mall. In a city where LVMH boasts more couture clients within the radius of a 15-minute cab ride than in all of the United States, the eye-watering prices at a standard fair booth should hardly raise eyebrows—and they don’t.
Collectors and dealers move effortlessly from mall, to gallery, to flagship, to metro station, to mall, to hotel, where trademarks like HSBC and UBS intertwine with those of cultural actors like M+, Gagosian, and Hauser and Wirth, forming one vivid bouquet of reified corporate culture.
You can hardly blame a starry-eyed visitor for not being able to distinguish apples from pears. This is the city, after all, where mega-collector Adrien Cheng, with his breathtaking K11 monolith, pioneered the “art mall” typology: “a revolutionary museum retail concept and a hybrid model of art and commerce,” in its own words. Happy shopping!
Installation view of “Zheng Mahler: Mushroom Clouds” at PHD Group in Hong Kong, 2026. Courtesy the artists and PHD Group. Photo by Felix SC Wong.
Two
Hong Kong loves real estate, and real estate loves art. (Or is it the other way around?)
In any metropolis, the history of art can be told through developments and speculation in property, and in Hong Kong—where there is too little of it—the art biz of the day is always a blatant expression of a string of complex business solutions.
The city’s art worlds are still vertical, but they are notably seeking outward and away, specifically south, to the still-gritty industrial area of Wong Chuk Hang.
At the entrance to a renovated office unit on the 19th floor of an anonymous high-rise, decadent floral arrangements with outsized greeting cards met visitors seeking out the new location of Shanghai’s Antenna Space—auspicious endorsements of Simon Wang’s new endeavor. On the south side, where space is more abundant and cheaper, it joins a string of other ventures: galleries such as Empty, Axel Vervoordt, and Blindspot, as well as Serakai Studio’s Gold, a new “salon” rumored to be the dazzling facade of a larger, transnational real estate scheme.
Meanwhile, back in Central at H Queen’s—the luxury retail tower that once housed much of the city’s art world—several floors have been vacated by their blue-chip renters. Pace and its drab backlog offerings are gone (it shuttered in October), but a pop-up fair called Pavilion took its place, offering hand luggage–sized figurative painting, the lingua franca of today’s international art world, in a flowing presentation from 20-plus international galleries.
Pavilion’s hard-working founder couple, Ysabelle Cheung and Willem Molesworth, run the most exciting local gallery of the moment, the aptly titled Property Holdings Development Group (PHD Group, for short). It’s housed in a savvily restored apartment on the 21st floor of a building near Goose Neck Bridge, which was used as a rooftop clubhouse by Cheung’s father. As with a safe house for spies, the address for the by-appointment venue is provided only at the last moment.
The week of Art Basel, local cyber-anthropologists Zheng Mahler built a living vivarium for mycelium there, informed by the biodiverse ecosystems of Lantau Island, the artist duo’s home, due west of Hong Kong Island. Theoretically self-sustaining due to the “generative, collaborative, and responsive networks of our natural world,” as a press release put it, the work featured a half-dozen machines to help manage ventilation, humidity, and temperature—all in all, an apt analogy for the climate-controlled art market as cultural (and natural) ecosystems collapse around the world.
Looking across Victoria Harbor, the home of M+, to Hong Kong Island, last month. Photo by Cheng Xin/Getty Images
Three
White men love power, and Hong Kong loves white men.
This tautology was confirmed yet again this season on several occasions, starting with the 80th birthday of Swiss mega-collector Uli Sigg, which was held on the Saturday before Art Basel at the city’s newish pride of a museum in West Kowloon, M+. Back in 2012, Sigg boosted the Herzog and de Meuron–designed institution’s holdings with a 1,000-plus-work donation. On Monday, two days before Basel opened, the museum staged another decadent party, where champagne flowed freely for approximately as many attendees. (Can you imagine the dishwashing?)
Across the harbor, it was still induction month for American Philip Tinari, the incumbent artistic director at the cultural complex Tai Kwun, which boasts a dazzling Herzog structure of its own. (Architecturally as well as financially, why look beyond Switzerland?) It’s run and funded by the gambling giant the Jockey Club, and Tinari’s responsibility—to stage ambitious art exhibitions without worrying his politically anxious board—is not one for rookies. Luckily, he brings experience from the mainland, where compliance is not a choice.
At the aforementioned Gold, the perennially Issey Miyake–wearing Tobias Berger—who seems at this point to have directed nearly all of Hong Kong’s major art institutions—has taken up the reins. The German’s first effort is a compelling group show composed entirely of black-and-white artworks by artists including Pak Sheung Chuen, Maria Tanaguchi, and Richard Serra.
Finally, at Para Site, the artist-founded old dame of Hong Kong’s art world, the board has at last appointed a successor to Billy Tang, who left in a flurry last summer. Its choice was James Taylor-Foerster, a 33-year-old Brit by way of Scandinavia, who in a statement pledged to pursue contemporary art that “makes room for thinking in public and radiates outward into culture at large.” For now, his characteristic mustache and peroxide blond mane have been seen hosting lunches and meetings about town. Watch this space.
Zero 10 at Art Basel Hong Kong. Courtesy Art Basel
Four
Does the art world actually like digital art? Do collectors?
These questions—too often posed and rarely answered—lingered forlornly at Zero 10, Art Basel Hong Kong’s newest sector, where garish red-chip art towered threateningly above the perimeter. While digitality is no doubt another lingua franca in the age of finance capital, its concretization in the form of high-priced artworks for private ownership still feels like a dialect spoken by few.
For me, and I may be naïve, this is largely an issue of competition. Outside the galleries and convention centers where dealers are trying desperately to sell GIFs as paintings to UHNWIs, entire CGI forests and hyperreal, koi-filled aquatic ponds bloom across 200-plus-foot screens that double as skyscraper facades. Sure, a commercial for a body wash may briefly interrupt these visual performances, but one cannot blame the mortal shopper’s eye for drifting toward a spectacle that is not only more dazzling, but entirely unpretentious—and free.